Many businesses and other enterprises nowadays store vast amounts of data in databases, often using commercially available database platforms in conjunction with software applications capable of accessing and processing the data to extract meaningful information therefrom in support of various business processes. For example, software applications for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, supplier relationship management, supply chain management, and product lifecycle management are widely used across many industries. With a growing need for real-time data access and increasing amounts of data, a trend has emerged to move data-processing functionality closer towards the database to reduce the frequency with which the database is accessed by external programs. This “code push-down” can be accomplished through the use of database procedures that are executed within the database itself. Database procedures, however, are limited in the types of operations they can perform.